Pittman and Friends Podcast

Poverty Amidst Plenty with Dr. Pam Brown

• County Executive Steuart Pittman • Season 2 • Episode 5

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Did you know that in Anne Arundel County, a third of its residents are living paycheck to paycheck? In this eye-opening conversation, County Executive Pittman sits down with Dr. Pam Brown, Executive Director of the Anne Arundel County Partnership for Children, Youth, and Families, to discuss her new "Poverty Amidst Plenty" report and the solutions that give hope.

Dr. Brown's unique perspective, shaped by a childhood in a poor urban neighborhood in England, drives her innovative approach. She explains the work of the Partnership's teams, which literally gather every relevant human service agency at the table for a single family to provide a "hand-up," not a handout.

The conversation goes deep into the economics of poverty, challenging traditional thinking with her concept of "wrong pockets." She reveals how investing in people and communities through programs like the pilot in Brooklyn Park provides a massive return on investment, a powerful message she has even taken to the Federal Reserve of New York.

Whether you're a policymaker, a community advocate, or simply someone who believes in the power of a helping hand, this conversation offers a masterclass in how compassion, data, and community-driven organizing can solve our most difficult problems. Listen and discover how making people healthy and self-sufficient benefits our entire county.

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County Executive Pittman:

Welcome everybody. I am with a good friend, dr Pam Brown, who is the Executive Director of the Anne Arundel County Partnership for Children, youth and Families. Welcome.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

Thank you. I'm very glad to be here.

County Executive Pittman:

I think we should have had you a long time ago, because you're one of the people who I love to talk to, because you think deep and think broad about poverty. Tell us what the partnership does. I will do that.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

So the partnership is a local management board. It's absolutely unique to Maryland. They were created as part of systems reform about 30 years ago with the real acknowledgement that human services and health really don't talk to one another. Well, they tend to serve children and families in silos, and so let's create local management boards and drag everybody to the table all the different department heads and residents and have a conversation across health and human services agencies about how to improve the lives of children and families. And so they were created. That's what we are. We all look different. There's one in every county.

County Executive Pittman:

You do all look different. We all look very different. I think we have the best one in the state. We have the biggest. Do we have the biggest? We have the biggest.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

We have the largest staff and we are one of the ones that have both a planning arm and a direct service arm. So part of the time we're planning, we're looking at needs, we're looking at assets, we're trying to figure out where needs are. Do some of them just plan? Some of them just plan and they were really created to just plan. They weren't really created to do what we do, to just plan. They weren't really created to do what we do. What we did was figure out where the needs were and then drop down in neighborhoods and try to find the sort of staff from the neighborhoods that understood the work and would be trusted or be trusted in mysteries, and would really be as helpful as they could be to children and families. We are based in kindness.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

It's an underused word now but, I think if we don't start with kindness, we can never serve anybody.

County Executive Pittman:

Okay. So I wasn't aware that there really exists to be planning organizations and that I was thrilled when I met you and what you all did, because when I ran for office I didn't even know, you hardly knew. Well, I knew you existed because I knew poverty emits plenty, the every three years document you put out and I remember carrying it in my car and waving it around when I would speak to groups talking about the Alice population the third of our residents that are basically living paycheck to paycheck, and how really so little of our county resources go to address that. So you did the planning and then you realized that you needed to actually deliver.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

And you've grown.

County Executive Pittman:

I'm proud to say that you've grown since I've been in office.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

We have grown enormously since you have been in office. We're almost twice the size.

County Executive Pittman:

Oh really.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

Okay, okay, and we've added teams of people and tons of services and we've really been place-based for a very long time with the notion that if you gather your resources and your dollars around the areas that are struggling the most, you do best for the economy, not just for families, but for the economy itself.

County Executive Pittman:

And as an old community organizer, that was one of the things that immediately excited me. And so you've got four communities of hope in Anne Arundel County, which is the four areas of highest poverty. Yes, West County, Annapolis, South County around Lothian and I guess a lot of South County and Brooklyn Park, correct? I remembered?

Dr. Pamela Brown:

that?

County Executive Pittman:

Yeah, it was very good, yeah, and so it is community-based organizing and some service delivery, right? Yes, and tell us about. So. The part that I think is the most amazing is you said that you convene the different health and human service agencies, but you literally do it for family after family after family. So tell us what CRICIT means. Oh, what does CRICIT mean?

Dr. Pamela Brown:

So CRICIT means Community Resource Initiative Care Team, and I won't explain why it has that big, long title, but basically it's a way to try to gather all of the different agencies together to work with families in partnership. So when families have multiple needs and we find more and more that families don't have just one issue they're dealing with, they're dealing with issues across, sometimes three generations in the same household, then you need all of the people who give services. We need aging, we need the Department of Juvenile Services, we need social services, we need not-for-profits, we need the development of disabilities.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

We need the school system and in fact here in Anne Arundel County the school system have always been partners in the cricket teams. So the aim of them really is to give every family an hour and we're all there and sometimes there's as many as 25 of us at the table and we really try to work out the issues for each family, figure out how we can be most helpful, how we can be most helpful. The aim is not to give a hand out but to give a hand up and make sure that they move towards some sort of self-sufficiency. We don't want families in government programs long-term because they don't do well there. We all do well when we are self-determining right.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

So we all get together, we give every family an hour, we come out with an action plan. We figure out which agency is on first, because that's really important.

County Executive Pittman:

Okay, the lead agency.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

And then we, the partnership, continue to coordinate that over a period of time to make sure everything that we said was going to happen for that family actually happens for that family.

County Executive Pittman:

Even the fact that you're talking about family and not individual is sort of innovative, right? Yes, Not just the troubled child or the yeah.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

So and we've really extended that over time because the truth is that no child is just a troubled child. Children live in families, and when families are not doing well, children are not doing well, and they also live in neighborhoods. So when that neighborhood has issues, when environmentally it's not sound, when the sidewalks don't lead you where you want to go, when there's not a nice trail out the back that you can go to, when there's not a place to play, all of those things create issues for families. So it's not just about economics, it's not just about school, it's about all of the things that surround us as we live our lives.

County Executive Pittman:

Okay. So there's a few things I want to get to here. We want to talk about you a little bit. We want to talk about Poverty Amidst Plenty, because you have just released it and you're about to go on tour.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

Yes, I'm about to go on tour.

County Executive Pittman:

Presentations of that for the public, which is incredibly important, and I want to talk a little about Enough in Brooklyn Park and about some of the work that you're doing with outside I guess mostly academics, but also the Federal Reserve of New York, believe it or not. So tell everybody about your background and how you got into this work.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

Well, I'm from a place called Leeds in England. Obviously, I grew up there, spent my first 30 years there, grew up in a very poor urban neighborhood, single mom, and I understand how difficult it is to find your way out when you find yourself in those circumstances. Now, for me, a lot of it was to do with a marvelous free education system in.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

England and obviously a supportive single mom who worked really hard. She was a tailor, but we struggled. It was a real struggle and when I got out of that neighborhood and went to university and built a different life, I sort of thought to myself I understand this and now I can do something about it. So, I have spent my entire life trying to understand how to solve issues related to the inequities of poverty and what that means.

County Executive Pittman:

And it is a very personal thing.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

People wonder why.

County Executive Pittman:

I'm passionate, that's why, that's interesting, because when we Americans hear a British accent we think oh, hoity-toity fancy and probably wealthy too, right. No.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

No.

County Executive Pittman:

Okay, well, I'm glad that you chose or landed in Anne Arundel County for much of your career. How long have you been at the partnership? 16 years, 16 years, wow, okay, poverty emits plenty. Let me just start out by saying you publish it. You are the author, I am the author. You do a huge amount of work interviewing folks and collecting data, and then you put it into a how many pages?

Dr. Pamela Brown:

this time it's 120. This time I've outdone myself. Okay, okay, yeah, if you need something to sleep.

County Executive Pittman:

And it's actually published by the Community Foundation of Anne Arundel County. So it's a partnership, yes, and it's really important, I think, in this county. So what is poverty amidst plenty? And I guess let's get into what you found this time. You know you do it every three years and how are we doing?

Dr. Pamela Brown:

So it's the community needs assessment. It's a way to look exactly that, to look at how we are doing, and I think one of the things that's difficult for people is it's a snapshot, right. I look at data over about a 12-month period as fast as I'm looking at data, data's changing. You know time is moving on. I'm talking to people, so everybody has to think of it like a moment in time. Pam Brown spent a year looking at the county.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

It was a bit of 24 and a bit of 25. What did I see at that particular time? I look at the secondary data, you know. I look at all the statistics. But I also talked this time to 188 people, just from very, very different walks of life. I always keep my sources private. I always tell everybody I'll never use your name. I just want to figure out what's going on for you and how you think we're doing. And that can be people in public housing. I talked to some wonderful young teens who were actually pregnant and in a particular service, and so it's everybody. And you know all of the people who run things in the county. And then I'm a qualitative researcher by profession. I have to like gather it all together and make sense of it. And I always say this is Pam Brown, it isn't the Community Foundation, it's not the county, it's the partnership, it's not the partnership, it's me. I looked at all this stuff and that's what I thought.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

And here it is, and so a lot of it is secondary data.

County Executive Pittman:

Some of it is qualitative, but in the end, even the secondary data that you've gotten from other sources is really useful to have in one place, in one document for our county, absolutely for the county it is yeah it's always good to have that.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

But you know I've been doing this oh god, this is the eighth one and really the issues that don't change are national and international issues that we're all struggling with, and we know what they are. They're affordable housing, they are childcare, they're transportation, and we are all struggling at all different levels, about how to solve those issues so that we can move families up to opportunity, so they can get best opportunity right. And it doesn't change. Now we've made some progress, I think here in the county, particularly around transportation. You know we now have free transportation. That's a big deal. We've added routes.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

We've almost quadrupled our ridership, yeah we have an innovative department head with a very, very small budget who spends like all of his life trying to figure out how do we make transportation work. We're never going to have adequate public transportation because you can't make it pay for itself, right? So what can you do besides that to create multimodal stuff? I mean transportation, affordable housing. I mean you've created a housing cabinet now so that we actually all get together. We're all spinning around this issue. We've got to solve it because people can't afford to live here. It's so simple and you got to have people. We have got to have people collecting the garbage. We have got to have people teaching our kids. If they can't afford to live here, we will not have that. So that's got to be solved. Childcare is a crisis. We lost a load during the pandemic. If people cannot find places to put their children, they cannot go to work, and if they do not go to work, that means one income and that means they don't have the spending power to lift the county up right. So all of this sort of fits together. So that's the big needs. I would say the one thing that can.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

Well, a couple of things that really concern me this time. I talked to a lot of people and across diversity, politics and everything else, there was a sense of anxiety and fear and discomfort related to where we are. Everyone felt insecure and it really didn't matter from what part of economics or anywhere else you were coming from. There was just definitely a lot of fear and anxiety. The sorts of changes at the federal level. It really impacted both the focus groups and the key stakeholder interviews I did and it was palpable.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

And the other thing was the and everybody said it everybody felt like they had lost the sense of community. I think during the pandemic neighbors sort of went back to looking after one another a bit and we in institutions we work together. You know we worked with health and we work with all of the different agencies and I think we've lost that again. You tend to go back into your silos, but I think In neighborhoods people are not showing up to things like neighborhood organizations, rotary clubs, the old sort of way of us gathering together in person and there's a feeling of loss of that and I'm not sure people are describing it in the way I'm describing it, but that way of us gathering and learning to understand one another and respect one another's views and just realize we're all in this hot soup together. I think there was a general feeling that somehow or other we have lost that and we have lost the ability to do that, and people are lonely and they're scared.

County Executive Pittman:

Yeah, so clearly some of that and I'm sure people said this was social media and devices. Yes, absolutely, we gather through that, we connect through that, but it's not human connection and all of the negatives that come along with that. And then I've seen the fear too and heard about the fear, because when you do get your news, wherever you get it, you're getting usually something scary because that gets clicks. And then there's things that really are scary about cuts to Medicaid, cuts to programs that people are relying on, and so they don't know how they're going to be able to survive.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

Yes, agreed and I think everybody thinks that there's this very small population of people for whom these cuts will be a big deal. I was just looking at the numbers. Today these cuts will be a big deal. I was just looking at the numbers today 112,000 residents are on Medicaid in this county.

County Executive Pittman:

Yeah, in this county, in this county Of 600,000 people, yeah.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

That is almost a fifth of our population. You cannot mess with those systems and not do an enormous amount of damage across the county. It's not just those 112,000 people. It's the knock-on effect of that in many, many ways. And all of those what they call eligibility programs, entitlement programs, were created with good reason, on sound economics. They weren't to do with you know, people aren't working hard enough people.

County Executive Pittman:

You know that's not what that's about people aren't working hard enough people. You know that's not what that's about. So I know that you have a more positive story about connection coming out of Brooklyn Park right now, and so let's jump to that and then we'll go back to the bigger picture of, you know, the role of corporations. Big money, you know. We know where the money is. It's sort of gone to the top of the economy. How can we get it back down so that it is actually solving some of these problems? So ENOUGH, enough is the governor's program. It is. You explain what ENOUGH is and then how we fit in.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

So ENOUGH is a place-based initiative that says very simply there are areas across the state that are doing very badly and unless we lift those up, we can't do really well as a state. You have to lift all boats. It doesn't mean that everybody has to be equal, but you do have to make a standard that is okay for everybody. And that's Governor Moore's theory and I agree with him. I think he's spot on the money. Literally he believes that everybody should be able to build wealth. Everybody should have the chance to own a house.

County Executive Pittman:

It doesn't have to be a big house. And I will just note that it wasn't chance that he spot on and it wasn't just his staff people figuring something out.

County Executive Pittman:

This is a guy who ran the Robin Hood Foundation in New York City after working on Wall Street, so understood the economy at large and then understood how to take millions and millions and millions of dollars that they raised and invest it in doing exactly what you're saying. So he's looked at what works and what doesn't work around the country and he wants to implement in Maryland something that works.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

And Governor Moore grew up like me.

County Executive Pittman:

He understands at a really human level, what it?

Dr. Pamela Brown:

feels like to grow up in a neighborhood and see almost no opportunity to do anything but be that. He understands that and he understands the enormous lift it is to remove yourself from that and have a different life.

County Executive Pittman:

So here we are in Anne Arundel in Brooklyn Park, and you had already the Brooklyn Park Communities of Hope efforts. I remember doing a cabinetel in Brooklyn Park and you had already the Brooklyn Park Communities of Hope efforts. I remember doing a cabinet meeting in Brooklyn Park early on, remember.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

We did.

County Executive Pittman:

Every department to talk about what they could do to help to address some of the things that were identified. So what did we have going? And then how did it become enough? And what's that look like?

Dr. Pamela Brown:

So Brooklyn Park was our first community of hope and basically because, no matter what data you look at, they are the lowest in terms of poverty, in terms of salary, in terms of the amount it has environmental issues. School children do not do as well there. In fact, if you live in Brooklyn Park, you will have 15 years less life expectancy than if you live in Arnold.

County Executive Pittman:

So once we realize that, and I just want to note that that doesn't mean it's a terrible place Brooklyn Park is a beautiful.

County Executive Pittman:

Yeah, I mean it was. It was built, I think, for folks who worked at the steel mills Brooklyn Park, for those who don't know, is the northern end of the county, adjacent to Baltimore City and folks who worked at the steel mills in the Port of Baltimore, and beautiful little single family and townhomes. But there's been a transition and there have been investors buying those properties and renting them out and there have been a lot of changes there.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

Right, and in many ways it's like the Rust Belt. It's like our own little personal Rust Belt. So obviously it was the place we wanted to be first, and what was so surprising is what a lovely place it is to be and how delightful the residents are. They're quite delightful. I think there are seven neighborhood associations in Brooklyn Park. They are a community that gathers, that cares, that speaks well of their neighborhood, and so it was sort of easy to start bringing some people to the table, and the pandemic interrupted that to some extent, although we used our communities of hope to do things like delivering Chromebooks and get food out there.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

But when we came back to monomality, we were much more into the idea of how do neighbours themselves decide how to change this, and that has been something that I've wanted to do for lo these many years to make sure that the people who live in a neighbourhood have control of the neighbourhood and suggest the sorts of things that they know will work, and they always know what will work because they're there and they're in it.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

So what Governor Moore's Enough initiative asks us to do is gather people together, but very specifically, you have got to get real-life residents to the table. You can't be saying this is someone who works there or this is the school teacher, you've got to have the people who live there. So we went one better than that and we actually said not only are we going to have those folk at the table and we're going to go get them, we're going to go find them, and obviously we knew a lot of them, but we're going to make sure they can outvote everybody else. So we have a resident council. That's part of our leadership team and they are more than they have the most votes. So the resident council can always be the voting entity. So we have just created a whole load of new strategies for Brooklyn Park. They were created by the residents themselves, they were prioritized and voted on and they even voted on the budget.

County Executive Pittman:

So I think that's and can I just note that you can tell me if I'm wrong and what it's looking like now, but Brooklyn Park is one of the most diverse communities.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

Yes.

County Executive Pittman:

And it is African, american, latino, white, it's everything.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

It is everything, yeah. So we have this wonderful, historically black community called Patapsco Park Pumphrey, pumphrey yeah, which is just wonderful 100 and odd years of marvelous history. Yep, we have a growing Hispanic population. We have the old white working classes who were part of industrial Baltimore. Yep, we have new immigrants because the prices are depressed. So we have an African population up there, we have a Korean population up there, so it's delightful.

County Executive Pittman:

And I will just say that that kind of community organizing is the kind that works, because they try to divide working people by race and when the opposite is happening and they're coming together in community. I started out working for AcORN as a community organizer and that originated in Arkansas, specifically because the poverty was multiracial and it was an experiment to see if you could really organize a multiracial coalition, and you're doing it.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

And we're doing it, and it's just when you hear everybody talking together from all of the different points of view. It is absolutely fantastic how respectful they are of one another. I mean the respect and the courtesy that I've seen among this just massively diverse group. We have two young people, one who's still at high school and one who's just in her first year at college, and they are respected just like everybody else, and they have a vote just like everybody else. There has not really been any contention from when we started, which was, I guess, almost 11 months ago now, to where we are now, which is just a very, very cohesive group of people who agree on one thing Brooklyn Park is going to be better, and that's what we're all going to work on together, and so it renews my faith that this work is not just possible, but it's perfect when it works.

County Executive Pittman:

And it makes everybody feel good.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

So the state dangles some money, Of course not as much as we'd hoped, not as much as we'd like or we expected, because they had to fill a $3.5 billion budget gap and you have to actually apply and win that money and you have to continue showing your success.

County Executive Pittman:

So I know you're in the process of applying for the second year funds, is that?

Dr. Pamela Brown:

right, today's the day, today's push-the-button day, oh really so yeah. I'm just waiting to hear we've pushed the button.

County Executive Pittman:

Okay, well, maybe the folks that are making the decisions will hear this podcast and decide Please shine a light. It's the best operation in the state, but it is about getting capital. You have to have some capital. You have to have some resources to make in communities, whether it's to do away with some social determinants of health and make it better, or whether it's something that's more broad-based like this.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

So give us a little update on all of that and what you've been doing in that world. So one of the things about local management boards is that they're generalist. You know, we have a big broad brush and we look across all of the systems and that takes us into some very strange rooms, honestly, that we don't expect to be in, and one of them for me was the Brookings Institution in Washington DC, because they wanted to talk about something called wrong pockets.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

I know what wrong pockets were but I got, they explained it to me. And the idea among economists is that health and human services are needed and have to be paid for, but it never comes out of the right pockets. It comes out of government and it comes out of hospitals, but it never comes out of the right pockets. It comes out of government and it comes out of hospitals and it comes out of people who don't necessarily gain. So they decided, well, let's see who gains, let's see what happens. If you actually look at you pay out money to improve people's lives, who does better apart from the people? And that is a really big question about return on investment right.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

What's the return on investment? Well, the return on investment is huge. Let's just talk about keeping people out of residential care. If you intervene early. We know residential care is the most expensive care of any care, whether you're talking about hospitals, prisons, juvenile services, mental health facilities, we know that that's where all the cost is. If you do something down the road, you can prove that it costs less. And who benefits from that? Well, the businesses who do better because they've got people who can actually go to work right, the hospitals and so on. You have to figure out what's the ROI first of all. What's the gain? And then who's the benefitor, who's benefiting? And it's generally speaking yes, government does better, but it shouldn't be that government gets to pay for that right. It should be that there's some sort of investment. If you're getting a return on investment, there should be some sort of investment at the front end. So that conversation got all the way up to the Federal Reserve and there's People in charge of the economy.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

People in charge of the economy started saying wait a minute, now maybe we do gain if we actually help people to thrive. If we keep people in sickness, in poverty and there's many of them then the whole economy doesn't thrive. Right, you might have lots of people at the top, and I'm not wanting to take away the people at the top, I'm just saying hey, but wait a minute now.

County Executive Pittman:

It especially doesn't thrive like the last few years post-COVID, when we've had a shortage of people that are able to fill the jobs that the businesses desperately need to fill.

County Executive Pittman:

So we've had three jobs for every person looking for a job in Anne Arundel County and in Maryland recently. And so when I talk to business leaders and ask them what government can do to be helpful, they say, well, we need people to be well-educated in the schools, we need people to have a way to get to work, we need people to have a place to live that they can afford. In this area, I mean, it's my agenda, it's your agenda, and whereas if it's the other way around and there's massive unemployment and three times the number looking for jobs than jobs, then we get back to the old thing of not caring and there's always somebody to replace the person that I fire because he asked for a raise and I don't want to give anybody a raise. So it's a great time, I think, to be doing this.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

I think so and I think the business community gets it. They're just not quite sure what to do about it. I talked to the vice president at the casino and he really understood childcare, not from the point of view of looking after children, but this notion of how do you grow a really intelligent, ready employee. Well, we know it starts at zero. In fact we know it starts with prenatal care. But we certainly know those first three years you've got to have quality childcare, but not just that. Then you've got to have childcare. So those very, very you know capable people you've grown can actually go to work and have their children be looked after and nurtured and made to be those wonderful adults. It's just so simple, it's not complicated. That's happening at the Federal Reserve at the moment to really start looking at return on investment around making people healthy, giving them some chance to build wealth, giving them some chance to spend money, buy houses, live properly. That's a boon for the Federal Reserve.

County Executive Pittman:

So you and I met a week or two ago with I should have written his name down David Aylward David Aylward, right, okay, and he's both been an academic, he's employed by a university but done a lot of government work as well and he found out about what the partnership was doing in Anne Arundel County, because they're doing a proposal to the Federal Reserve of New York you are going to be presenting up there soon yes, federal Reserve of New York. You're going to be presenting up there soon and they're looking for jurisdictions that can really do a full program that really wraps their arms around families and doesn't just get to one social determinant of health but organizes communities and has outcomes all across the board and then to pitch that to investors.

County Executive Pittman:

And it's so exciting because it's called flourishing, which is a right mouthful, but you know, whatever it sounds like what they put in toothpaste to me, but whatever Flourishing is flourishing.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

But really what we want to do is create flourishing, thriving children inside of flourishing, thriving families, inside flourishing, thriving neighborhoods. Who wouldn't want that?

County Executive Pittman:

Right. So he came to you to be the third jurisdiction to pilot this right. Is it Cincinnati?

Dr. Pamela Brown:

Columbus, it's Cincinnati, Columbus and us and.

County Executive Pittman:

Anne Arundel.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

County. Yes, okay, yes, and a little Anne Arundel County.

County Executive Pittman:

All right.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

So we, at the very least, we will be able to prove, after three years, a return on investment. Because these are economists, they're not like bleeding hearts like me. These are people who understand this stuff and they are going to be tracking what the savings are when we do this work, right. What the savings are when we build a sidewalk so that this set of families can walk to Best Buy and increase Best Buy's profits right, we're going to be able to look at all of those pieces. What is the cost of a healthy child?

County Executive Pittman:

as opposed to an unhealthy child?

Dr. Pamela Brown:

What is the cost of an unhealthy adult? I mean, we can go on and on and on. It's a different way to look at how we manage, how we manage as human beings. It doesn't mean to say it's not socialism, it's how do you make capitalism work for everybody, which is a different message.

County Executive Pittman:

Yep, yeah, I mean, that's why they're doing it right.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

Right.

County Executive Pittman:

And hopefully our success. They can actually pitch to investors and show it's a good investment. So that's, I know it's what gets you out of bed in the morning and offers hope. When you do a report like poverty emits plenty, that is kind of depressing. It can be. Yeah, yeah, I was really hoping that by this point in seven years in that we would have a poverty emits plenty that showed that we had made incredible progress. And while we have in programs and in people's lives, because of the pressures from the economy, from the cost of things, it's not showing up in people's lives. I mean I think we're better than we would have been had we not done those things. So we have to look to the next level of government and we have to look at the whole system and try to improve.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

I will say this when you are a county executive for eight years, you really don't get to see the good you've done, because it takes so long to change things. It takes so long All you can see is the seeds and some nice shoots. You know the shoots of the 7th Centre, the shoots of community centres coming to Brooklyn Park and the general behavior of the county is different. I mean, I've been here for 16 years.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

It has been a different county a more innovative county, a more thoughtful county, and that will grow after you're gone.

County Executive Pittman:

I want to come back in 10 or 15 years and look at the data from Mead Village and the Severn community around the Severn Center. All of the work that's been doing there should mean that the kids who are growing up there now have better outcomes than the kids that were growing up there 10 years ago.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

And I believe that's so. I believe, that's so, but it just takes a long time to see the difference.

County Executive Pittman:

Yeah, Well, thank you for everything that you do and putting your devoting your life to this work, and I have a feeling that you're going to continue doing this work, whether you want to or not until you're down underneath. And hopefully I will and many of us will. So thank you, thank you very much.

Dr. Pamela Brown:

You're listening to the Pittman and Friends podcast. If you like what you hear, please hit the subscribe button, share with a friend and join us for the next episode.

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County Executive Steuart Pittman

Host
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Pam Brown

Guest